A Study Of Spatial Narrative In Beloved

The research of Toni Morrison and her works have come to a climax in China since she won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.The most representative works is Beloved,which examines the infanticide incident by the black female,Sethe and connects southern plantation and northern town as two opposing scenes through the real life and psychological activities of its characters.This is an bloody accusation of slavery.This paper analyzes the artistic features of spatial narrative in Beloved by adopting the spatial narrative theory combined with the text analysis.This paper is composed by six parts,including introduction,four chapters and conclusion.The first part gives a brief introduction of the experience of Toni Morrison and summarizes the content of Beloved as well as the research at home and abroad.Based on the spatial narrative,the main part explores four forms of spatial narrative,existential space,psychological space,social space and textual space.The first chapter narrates southern plantation and northern town as a couple of dual opposite,such as south and north,country and town.In the novel,the author setting three life scenes which are “sweet home”,“No.124 on Bluestone” and “the Clearing”,represents the past,present and future of the black.The second chapter mainly analyzes the absence of love and freedom from Baby Suggs,Sethe,and Paul,discusses the great psychological trauma that the slavery has caused them,creating the huge shadow to their psychological space and resulting in their entangled psychological space.The third chapter demonstrates a in-depth space practices of three generations of the black women to escape from the slavery.The three generations represented by Suggs,Sethe and Beloved take extreme measures and end up in a failure.Only the youngest Denver manages to connect with the black community in a rational way,and eventually succeeds in driving away the ghost.And the last chapter focuses on the textual space from the selectivity of language,the linearity of the text and the perspectival structure and discusses the impact of the author’s skillful narrative in Beloved,which reveals spatial features of narrative structure.